Showing posts with label Dolphin. Show all posts

April 23, 2019

Several Updated Applications Landing In KDE Neon Today

Today saw several updated applications landing in the KDE Neon repositories, the KDE Neon team announced today.

Arriving fresh for your downloading or installing pleasure are the following:

Skrooge 2.19
KMyMoney 5.0.4
Kipi Plugins 5.9.1
Kdenlive major refactoroo 19.04

It would appear to be a good day for those of you looking to either get your financial house in order, as well as open sauce content creators across the world.

Also announced is new functionality in Dolphin file manager that allows thumbnails of Appimages to be shown, which is always nice to see.

As for Kipi Plugins, they should be of interest to those who use KPhotoAlbum, Gwenview, or Spectacle, and wish to have some social-sharing functionality built-in. More information can be found about the reasoning for releasing Kipi Plugins as a stand-alone release can be found over at J Riddell's blog post.

Tweet announcing today's releases
for KDE Neon

The original Tweet from the Neon team can be found here.

September 17, 2013

It's All About Choice: Alternate Applications For Your Kubuntu / NetrunnerOS / Linux Mint KDE Computer

We are very lucky here in KDE-land. By the grace and talent of ~~hundreds~~ thousands of developers and maintainers, we have excellent default applications that are carefully packaged together and installed on your KDE-based system. Everything one needs to get the most out of their computer in order to get things done. All of this is available to us via the wonderful concept of Open Source.

By default we have multimedia applications, office applications, games, email and PIM applications, vast system management tools and utilities. Not to mention web browsers and...well, you get the idea. Add to the mix the vast repositories maintained by the wonderful folks at Canonical, as well as the vast number of applications available via various Launchpad repositories.

July 13, 2012

Dolphin Update: How You Can Get Involved And Keep The Best File Manager In Linux Rocking

Earlier we published an article along with many other Linux-centric media outlets that covered the fact that the lead developer of Dolphin was stepping down. We also said that the future was bright as an heir-apparent maintainer was named. The maintainer, freininghaus, asked for development help and suggested other ways people could get involved with the project. This is of utmost importance, as certainly a file manager is one of, if not the most important application on a desktop system.

Today came a follow-up article that outlines how one can get involved with development in order to start contributing to Dolphin. In summary:

Two patches have already been contributed; One will make the 4.9 release and the other will not
There has been triaging of incoming bugs. The article does not say whether these triages are from new contributors or not
freininghaus is away the next few weeks but left advice on how to get involved and start helping the project out

For those wishing to get involved it is suggested to start by helping with incoming bugs. Another way, and the one of most importance in getting acquainted with Dolphin's code base, is to build Dolphin from source. The article has some guidelines for doing this and points to a few good resources to get started.

It should be interesting to see how Dolphin survives, and if it thrives from the renewed interest by people wishing to get involved.Maybe a sign that out of any bad news good things (and perhaps even better things) can come of it. Will it? Time, as always, will tell.

Referenced article with all the details of how to get involved can be found here.

July 6, 2012

KDE Update: Dolphin's New Maintainer Speaks Out; Encourages New Contributor Involvement

As seen all over the Interwebs over the last week, Dolphin's maintainer stepped down for personal reasons. Before doing so he had, in true Open Source tradition, hand-picked his successor in the name of Dolphin contributor freininghaus. Recently, the new maintainer of KDE's premier file manager application spoke out for the first time via his blog and shared some thoughts and hopes for the future of the project. In summary, his blog post is a call for help and an open invitation for new contributors to get involved in helping shape the future of this very respected and heavily relied-upon core KDE application.

According to the post, the author remains committed to Dolphin's "stability and ease of use". He then goes on to describe his mid-term goals for Dolphin is to attract new developers. He cites the following reasons:

Any software project with a low bus number is in great danger.

I am the maintainer now, but that does not mean that the amount of time that I can spend on Dolphin development will suddenly increase. I will try to read all incoming bug reports (note that it can take a while until I look at a newly reported bug – even maintainers have a real life and go on holiday sometimes) and try to reproduce them, at least those that can be reproduced using my hardware and software setup. I will also try to fix a couple of bugs for each release. But I cannot implement any major new features if I have to do it all alone.

I do not like to work alone. I have always enjoyed discussions about code with Peter and other developers, and I quite like the idea that all commits should be reviewed. Obviously, discussing patches and review for everyone is only possible if the number of people who contribute to the project on a regular basis is greater than one.

He goes on to suggest that new contributors join a soon-to-be-organized Bugsquad team to triage and label existing Dolphin bugs. Other ways one can contribute would be bug triaging, user support over at the KDE Forums, and finally, help with translations.

In summary, the future of Dolphin is in our hands. If you have been looking for a way to get started contributing to KDE, here is a great opportunity!

June 28, 2012

Ubuntu One For Kubuntu And KDE

One of the longstanding pests in Kubuntu-land has been the lack of integration with some of the more useful tools developed by Canonical. I call these "missed opportunities for synergistic benefits"...or something like that. These include things like a lack of an Ubuntu-like Software Center that includes the music store and commercial apps like the Ubuntu client does, as well as (and maybe more importantly) a proper Ubuntu One client for KDE. The way I see it, one of the potential differentiators that separates Kubuntu from other KDE-centric distributions is the opportunity to benefit from all of the development that goes on in the Ubuntu Community and also via paid development that is sponsored directly via Canonical.

One developer has stepped up and gotten us a little bit closer to scratching an important item off of this list: Namely, the development of a proper Service Menu for KDE's Dolphin that allows easy synchronization between file(s) and / or folder(s) from directly within the powerful file manager.

If you are not familiar with Ubuntu One, you can get re-acquainted here: https://one.ubuntu.com/. Basically, in a nutshell, Ubuntu One (U1) is the following:

Cloud Storage (5GB free, more can be purchased)
File access
File / folder sharing via URL to public or private recipients
Streaming music
Access to all of the above on any device, including Android and iOS
You can also sync Tomboy notes

Today in Ubuntu there are three basic ways to interact with Ubuntu One on the desktop. These include the Ubuntu One Desktop Client, which is a daemon that runs in the background and syncs your /Home/Ubuntu One folder with the cloud storage, the Nautilus service menu which allows you to sync (or stop synching) a file or folder of your choosing, as seen in the picture below. Finally, there is a web client as well for management of your files through a web interface. This last method is, for example, how you would go about sharing files or folders within your U1 account in Kubuntu.

Ubuntu One in Ubuntu's Native File Manager, Nautilus

Well that's all well and good, but what about some love for Kubuntu and KDE you ask? Well, thanks to an Irishman named ShaneQful, we Kubuntu users can now enjoy Ubuntu One via a new Service Menu right from with Dolphin! This is the same functionality that exists in a stock Ubuntu installation. Pretty sweet!


Ubuntu One in Kubuntu's Native File Manager, Dolphin

Installation is pretty straightforward: Basically you download and extract the tar package to your .kde/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus folder. Open Dolphin, and you'll see that the U1 menu option is now available! Full details are in his blog post. According to the post, future plans include a way to verify visually what files are currently in sync and which are not.

Many thanks go out to Shane for developing this as I'm sure many Kubuntu users will find this most useful. To me, this provides a deeper integration into the desktop in Kubuntu and positions Ubuntu One to be on par and in some ways surpass using other services, such as Drop Box in day to day computer use.

What do you think? Would you like to see the U1 client for KDE become standard in the upcoming Kubuntu 12.10? Such a move would have our vote.